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National Academies Press NISO Presentation Experimental Navigation: Discovery, Exploration, Distillation Michael Jensen (mjensen@nas.edu) Director of Publishing Technologies, the National Academies Press (www.nap.edu) Director of Web Communications, the National Academies (www.nationalacademies.org)

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Presentational Plan Overview of the NAP The balancing act of our existing Open Access model Description/Demonstration of NAP's Discovery, Exploration, and Distillation and Tools Discussion of "Discovery" vs. "Search" Experimental possibilities The Secret to Discovery Success

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National Academies Press Publisher for: National Academy of Sciences National Academy of Engineering Institute of Medicine National Research Council Publishes ~ 200 reports/year advising the US and world on issues of science, engineering, technology, medicine, and health.

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The Open Access Publications of The National Academies Press today > 3600+ reports fully, freely browsable online (> 550,000 pages available, each printable) > 18,000,000 visitors/year; ~ 20% from developing countries ~ 160,000,000 page views/year (95 million Openbook pages, 65 million other) NAP has been digitizing publications for free online dissemination since 1994 (GIF page images, page-based HTML, PDFs, TEI XML)

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Overall Missions of The National Academies Press Dual, Competing Missions: a) Dissemination: generate the most impact by getting reports into the most hands and minds b) Cost Recovery/Self-Sustainability: NAP is required to be self-sustaining through sales of content

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Confronting the Dissemination Mission Balancing act of sales and openness All publications FREE for online browsing/reading by anyone All publications have rich Discovery and Exploration tools About half of our publications are free in PDF; the other half are for sale in PDF; all publications free in Acrobat PDF for researchers in developing countries

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Recent Sample Publications Saving Lives, Buying Time: Economics of Malaria Drugs in an Age of Resistance Signposts in Cyberspace: The Domain Name System and Internet Navigation A Patent System for the 21st Century Strengthening U.S-Russian Cooperation on Nuclear Nonproliferation Earth Science and Applications from Space: Urgent Needs and Opportunities to Serve the Nation Policy Implications of International Graduate Students and Postdoctoral Scholars in the United States Thinking Strategically: The Appropriate Use of Metrics for the Climate Change Science Program Population, Land Use, and Environment: Research Directions The Smallpox Vaccination Program: Public Health in an Age of Terrorism Guide for the Care and Use of Laboratory Animals Free in translations: Chinese, Japanese, French, Korean, Portuguese, Russian, Spanish, Taiwanese Emerging Technologies and Ethical Issues in Engineering: Papers from a Workshop, October 14-15, 2003 Atlantic Salmon in Maine Understanding Racial and Ethnic Differences in Health in Late Life: A Research Agenda

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Challenges to NAP Report Discoverability Book-length documents make single-term searching wacky Vast diversity of content (science, technology, medicine) Terms-of-art Very general (How People Learn) to very specific (Iodotrifluoromethane: A Toxicity Review) However: Consistent, coherent, controlled environment In-house talent Institutional willingness to experiment

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Basic Open Access Table of Contents, for every report, with links to opening page of the chapter Openbook Page, every report page displayed with navigation and search Search inside book, related titles, etc.

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Unique Knowledge Discovery and Exploration Tools Based on both explicit and implicit metadata, as well as fulltext; lexical work all based on ASCII Active Skim View of every chapter, to ease online browsing Discovery Engine, an integrated search results set with intrinsic further-exploration tools (FMLT, etc) Web Search Builder, a means of using the key terms of any chapter to build targeted searches of Google, etc., as well as the National Academies Press. Reference Finder, a Web form into which one can drop a rough draft or an article to "find more like" it.

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Discovery vs. Search Search is about precision: finding what you ask for; Discovery is about finding what you wanted, but didn't know to ask for. Successful search is precise; successful discovery is always approximate Goal is to enable serendipitous discovery -- things close to what we want, that expand our understanding Discovery may need expansion or refinement; search rarely does. Discovery requires "find more like this" that is content- and context-aware How does the user find what she wants, in a diverse, interface-driven, multi-container, multi-author, distributed environment? What kind of "knowledge exploration, discovery, and distillation" capabilities are really desired by users? ... and which users?

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Discovery "Standards"? Difficult to say that Discovery/Exploration results are "right" -- but we will be experimenting with this Lexical discovery, linguistic navigation, and thematic-clustering, etc. may be appropriate for researchers, but also need "Search" for most users Further experiments are of course needed, e.g. Clustering based on common key elements; Lexical Filtering with similar basis Significance weights (of terms, of types, of contexts) will need to be user-driven more and more, as more material online "Implicit metadata" may be a assistive; "explicit metadata" may be determinative. How much engagement from the author/recommender/publisher/provider can be expected? "suggested tags" vs. "recommended key terms" vs. "algorithmic context" vs. "user-driven connectedness over time"

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Discoverability Challenges Big and little documents Fulltext and abstract-only documents General and specialized documents Interconnected and orphaned documents Standards-based and nonstandard documents Expository text and cookbook text Curated and hoovered Open and gated HTML, PDF, database, etc.

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What is the Secret to Discovery Success? to fail,    and fail,     and fail again ... but less,   and less,     and less. (after Piet Hein)